California Institute of the Arts
Critical Studies
Projects | 2017
Microbial Gardens
Cameron Meakin, Hunter Janos, Cameron Creath, & Fawn Quinn
Microbial Gardens is a full-sized experience of the microscopic world. Guests stroll among photosynthetic architecture where each tower is a unique microbiome generating light, color, and smells.
INstructor
Douglas Goodwin
Douglas Goodwin is an interdisciplinary artist working in technology, artificial intelligence, and language systems. He makes videos, writings, performances, and machines that comment on media fidelity, convenience, and human desire. Notable works include “Kerouac Machine,” a Teletype that delivers occasional communications from Jack Kerouac and “Nonsense nor Sensibility,” a new novel by Jane Austen. Goodwin also works in film and video, notably a dreamy remix of the 1968 film “Bullitt” titled “Artifact #1 (Ford vs. Chevy)” and the “Lossless” series with Rebecca Baron. Lately, he has been collecting interviews on labor issues surrounding the production of color. See https://cairn.com/ for more.
Advisors
Michael Elowitz
Michael Elowitz is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering, and Applied Physics at Caltech. Dr. Elowitz's laboratory has introduced synthetic biology approaches to build and understand genetic circuits in living cells and tissues. Elowitz received his PhD in Physics from Princeton University, and did postdoctoral research at Rockefeller University.
James Linton
James Linton is a Research Scientist at the California Institute of Technology. He specializes in Confocal Microscopy, Cell Biology, Molecular Biology, and Cell culturing. James recently co-authored a study titled “Synthetic recording and in situ readout of lineage information in single cells.” Termed Memory by Engineered Mutagenesis with Optical In situ Readout(MEMOIR), this system enables cells to record genomic lineage and event histories in a format that may be examined in situ.
Mike Bryant
Mike Bryant is a biologist and a statistician. His research has appeared in several scientific journals: Science, Nature, American Naturalist, Ecology, PLoS, Animal Behaviour and Environmental Biology OF Fishes. Mike’s research interests in biology include functional anatomy, animal behavior, and life history evolution. One unexpected discovery was that female Trinidadian guppies (Poecilia reticulata) have a prolonged post-reproductive lifespan (AKA: menopause).
Recently Mike has put the analytic tools used to study and make comparisons of the lives of freshwater fish to conduct longitudinal studies of students in the California’s primary schools as part of a National Science Foundation-funded study on how to improve K12 mathematics and science education. Mike has also put individual based statistical methodologies to use for generating art as a collaborator in Grisha Coleman’s “Echo::System” project.